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Concept Attainment

Welcome to a sharing space for Medicine Hat teachers working with the concept attainment strategy. This space is a WIKI and it is easy and free for you to use. It is a private space for teachers to post concepts with their helpful hints and exemplars for other colleagues to use.
The teacher considerations and classroom steps are for review. Feel free to add to them as this is a collaborative space. The more heads that think together, the better and more enriched our classrooms.
Click on your grade and upload your word documents for others to benefit from. Anyone can access all the grades. The idea is to add literacy and other concepts that are relevant to your grade. As we all know though, our students are at different stages in their learning so one's grade concepts may be another grades' review!

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Teacher Considerations

1. Select a concept you want your students to learn.
2. Create a concept definition map to clarify the concept and find essential attributes and properties.
3. From the definition map, provide students with at least 7 yes and no examples by introducing a strong yes first, then a strong no. Examples can be words, pictures, objects or math problems. Continue with the examples in random order but try not to give too many of one example at one time. No exemplars should help students think more about the yes exemplars.
4. Students verbalize the attributes they see and teachers record these on large paper for students to see.
- How are the positives shared by the yes examples similar? Different?
- What are some of the characteristics of the yes and no examples?
- What differentiates the yes examples from the no examples?

Concept Attainment Class Strategy

1. Select a concept with strong attributes.
2. Provide students with yes and no examples. Yes examples have all the important pieces of the concept. No examples may contain some but not all of the critical attributes.
3. Students should identify verbally while the teacher records on chart paper what yes samples all have in common. Have students think about how yes is different than no examples as well. (critical thinking).
4. Continue adding more exemplars to the list.
5. Develop a set of attributes for the concept after reviewing all the examples.
6. Have students create a name or rule for the concept.
7. If possible, design a final application task that gives students a chance to apply their understanding of a concept.